Sage School of Philosophy 

Goldwin-Smith Hall, G64

Reception to follow.

Mixed Duties and Overdetermined Collective Harms

Overdetermined collective harms include those resulting from climate change, structural injustice, and unscrupulous consumerism. While no one individual makes the collective harm worse or more likely to occur, together these individuals cause, or fail to prevent, significant harm. I will argue that if we want to hold individuals responsible for such collective harms, we should appeal not to their putative complicity in the wrongdoing of another or of a collective, but to their own wrongdoing—specifically, to their violation of a mixed duty. A mixed duty is a duty to perform or to refrain from performing certain actions while having (or lacking) certain ends or attitudes. Examples include the duty to apologize while feeling contrite, the duty to divert the trolley onto the sidetrack while intending to save the five on the main track, and the duty to help the needy while having their wellbeing as a non-instrumental end.

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